Originally Posted by DArtagnan
I'm waiting for a single Kickstarter game to live up to its potential - before I feel I can truly trust the model. I'm sceptical, because I think there are several pitfalls that might be hard to avoid.

Unfortunately, so far, I seem to be right - though very few of the interesting ones have come out. But they've all seemed to be quite underwhelming and very limited in scope - with the recent Shadowrun being a prime example.

I don't think Kickstarter by itself raises enough funds to do this. SR:R cost $1.8 m (which remember, doesn't actually mean $1.8 m in game assets due to Amazon/Kickstarter cuts, taxes, overhead, licenses, and salaries) plus an unknown figure from loans. When you look at what they made with limited resources I think they did a good job. But, it doesn't stack up well against other games in the genre (which even old stuff like BG 2, probably had much larger budgets). For a game with BG 2 type scope I think we'd have to see either a huge Kickstarter, a $3-4m Kickstarter sequel where a lot of the tools & assets are already in place (probably in conjunction with some profits from previous game), or Kickstarter being used in conjunction with other financial backing.

Don't get me wrong, I hope Wasteland 2, Project Eternity, and ToN are the great RPGs with the scope we want, but I'm not going to hold my breath (I didn't include D: OS because I'm unsure how much of a game they had before the Kickstarter).